Building an Educational Appliance from Ubuntu 10.04

 

This is a short tutorial describing how to build an educational virtual cluster appliance starting from an Ubuntu 10.04 image. A more detailed description is given at Testing Grid Appliance.

 

  1. Deploy an Ubuntu 10.04 appliance locally. You can download an Ubuntu 9.10 VMware appliance here, or create an instance on FutureGrid of an Ubuntu 10.04 VM.
     
  2. Sudo to root and install the grid-appliance baseline package as follows:
    1. apt-get install wget
    2. echo "deb http://www.grid-appliance.org/files/packages/deb/ lucid contrib" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
    3. wget http://www.grid-appliance.org/files/packages/deb/repo.key
    4. apt-key add repo.key
    5. apt-get update
    6. apt-get install grid-appliance-base
       
  3. To configure the appliance to connect to a GroupVPN, use one of the following two options:
    1. To use a default GroupVPN and connect to a public pool hosted at UF, simply install the package apt-get-install grid-appliance-public-pool.

    2. To use our defined Group:
      1. Create a GroupVPN and GroupAppliance at http://grid-appliance.org . For an example, see Deploying independent appliance pools.
      2. In the GroupAppliance interface, download and extract the floppy configuration file for a client (floppy.img) and place it in/opt/grid_appliance/etc/floppy.img .
      3. /etc/init.d/grid_appliance.sh restart 
         
  4. Within a few seconds, your appliance should obtain a virtual IP address on the virtual network interface tapipop. Once it does, wait a few seconds and type condor_status to check the status of other nodes in the pool; you may need to retry a couple of times until connected.